In-Depth

Trillium First to Offer Data Quality Solution for Oracle’s Customer Data Hubs

Address validation for Oracle E-Business Suite 11i.9 now possible, but only on Windows and Unix platforms for now

• By Stephen Swoyer
• 06/02/2004

Last month, Trillium Software announced an option—called the Address Validation Adapter (AVA)—for its flagship data-quality and data-profiling suite that facilitates address validation for customers using Oracle’s E-Business Suite 11i.9 and Customer Data Hub environments.

Sounds ho-hum, doesn’t it? Perhaps not, says Mike Schiff, a senior analyst with consultancy Current Analysis Inc. After all, he observes, organizations are actively seeking data-quality solutions, and no other vendor to date has introduced a data-quality offering for Oracle’s relatively new Customer Data Hub. “[A]s the first vendor to provide this for Oracle Customer Data Hub, Trillium can derive many benefits, especially if it gets Oracle sales representatives to refer business its way,” he points out.

For the record, Oracle announced its Customer Data Hub—effectively an operational data store that facilitates the consolidation and cleansing of data from a variety of different sources—in February (see http://info.101com.com/default.asp?id=5147).

In a certain sense, it’s not surprising that Trillium is first out of the gate with a data-quality offering for Customer Data Hub. The data quality stalwart and Harte-Hanks Inc. subsidiary is, after all, a long-time Oracle partner. In fact, notes Schiff, the Trillium Software System is certified for version 10g of Oracle’s Warehouse Builder, and has been embedded in prior versions of that product dating back to at least January 2002.

The new AVA option is based on Trillium’s Data Quality Connector middleware, which allows third-party software applications to function as a client and make calls to Trillium Software System data quality suite. The result is that customers can tap Trillium’s global libraries of country addresses to validate and correct street-level address information either during the bulk import process or during address validation and correction.

Current Analysis’ Schiff thinks that Trillium’s new AVA option is largely a win-win for both that company and Oracle customers, although he stresses that there are a couple of potential hitches. First, he says, is that Trillium’s AVA is available only for Windows and Unix platforms—yet Oracle has made a major commitment to Linux, which is one of its strategic platforms.

Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, he notes, Trillium may in effect be pigeon-holing itself with the new offering. “Trillium’s data-quality technology extends well beyond name and addresses. Yet the association with a product that Oracle has branded as Oracle Customer Data Hub will only serve to reinforce false perceptions, and competitive [fear, uncertainty, and doubt] that Trillium technology is limited to name-and-address data quality."